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I think everyone should thank me for upgrading my Picasa Web Albums account two days ago to get a little bit more than 250mb storage. Today they gave all default accounts 1gb storage just to make me regret my purchase.

Also what is it with services not offering refunds? World of Warcraft and Picasa have both told me that they’re “unable to provide refunds” lately:

We’re unable to provide refunds, so we encourage you to try the free service before purchasing additional storage.

Well I uh… did that. And then you quadrupled the amount of storage on free accounts a day and a half later.

As I was plodding along working on my album today I wound up reading a lot of posts about the death of the album (1, 2, 3).

I thought the album was dead when I started putting my music on the net years ago. I didn’t even bother releasing an album until a few years later (“people just want to download mp3s!”) but I was totally wrong.

I don’t have much artistic or romantic attachment to albums but I do think there’s a practical aspect to them. Assuming it’s not one good song plus eleven songs of filler, I’d rather have 45 minutes of entertainment from an artist I enjoy than 3 minutes. It’s the difference between watching one episode of a series versus the whole season.

But I don’t see why it has to be exclusively albums or singles, it’s the future now, they can co-exist! I think as budgets shrink, artists become more independent and audiences diversify and fragment, it’s harder to decide or define what a worthy “single” is. That’s what the filtration of the Internet is for, that’s why file-sharing is awesome. The hits will bubble to the top.

Do you want each song to be focus-grouped before you get to hear it? An album’s still a pretty good vehicle for putting out a batch of songs and seeing what spreads.

Setting up all this live show stuff is officially kicking my ass. I am angry and hurt and tired. I’m about ready to put together a live show of me configuring software for an hour and a half and call it “Working-on-a-Performance Art”.

My mind is blown — BLOWN — by how annoying this all is with the tools currently available. I’m jealous of DJs. It’s like nobody designing software wants anyone to change chords mid-song anymore. “You mean you have two SEPARATE chord sequences in a song? That’s unsanity!”

I got some emails from musicians using Live who feel similarly and Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music listened to me cry on the phone. Matt from Flux Minor shared his live Ableton project with me. His approach was to render individual channels (drums, bass, etc) of the entire track instead of recreating it loop-based as I was.

It gives you less flexibility but he assured me they haven’t felt the need to alter arrangements on the fly while performing. So I ran off in that direction as it sounded a lot easier. I was four songs into the rendering and recreating process when I realized Ableton Live can only send program changes to external gear (like my GT-6) at the launch of a new clip. So if you’re not setting it up all crazy like I was before you’re SOL for program changes.

Guess I’ll go kick something.

Can I say that Paypal has the slowest, most poorly organized and frustrating website of all time? Because I just did. I’m basically at swear level 8 at this point.

I’ve been thinking about music videos a lot, mainly inexpensive but effective music videos. One of my ideas for the first single off the next album was to film myself playing and singing in front of a green screen and then put that online for people to remix (a la The Colbert Report’s green screen challenge.)

Today I read that The Decemberists beat me to it. My hat’s off to you, you damn, damn Decemberists.

I’m just about ready to give up reading Digg and it’s not due to the latest “democracy” controversy. It’s because I’m totally tired of reading stories about Digg. So tired.

Also I’ve moved bradsucks.net to a new server. Hopefully this one won’t crash all the time.

Got a show tonight, so yesterday I thought “hey, why not use MySpace to send out invitations to people who are in the area?” Man, what a good use for a social network, I think to myself.

I head over and create an event and it manages not to break. Then I search for MySpace friends that are in Ottawa to invite and the search totally doesn’t work. It just returns nothing every time and that’s just completely incorrect.

Anyway I was so angry and it was too early to kill the pain with alcohol so I wrote a script to grab all the URLs of my 900+ friends and then search their profiles for the word “Ottawa”. Better than nothing. God I hate MySpace so much.

Adam emailed me to let me know he did up Look and Feel Years Younger for Frets on Fire. You can grab it here. It’s got settings for Medium and Awesome modes. Pretty sweet. (Other songs are here.)

You know, it’s bad enough that I’m forced to use MySpace because it’s where all the people are at. Bad enough that I’m stuck replying to fan mail in their awful little inbox manager which is cluttered with ads, slow, inefficient and totally unable to search emails for later reference.

Also bad enough is that every page I go to is an all-out assault of audio visual battery, violating at least two of my senses at all times, not even including my sense of good taste. It’s bad enough that with each “connection” I make with a fan I’m entirely dependent on MySpace to contact them in the future as I have no email address for them. Not to mention that I will certainly lose and forget about them in my hundreds of friends. Who were those dudes from around here who wanted to come to my next show? Uhhh.

I also can’t import my blog there and on top of that I can’t import a gig list, so I have to maintain the one on my site at the same time. I can’t change the four songs I’ve uploaded there without breaking all the pages that people have linked them on. Blah blah blah, on and on.

So on top of ALL of that, keeping in mind it being bought for $580 million dollars: COULD IT AT LEAST STOP BEING BROKEN ALL THE TIME:

“Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.” Man, don’t surprise me like that. I nearly fell down.

I probably see this error four times a day and I’m by no means an avid MySpacer. I just log in to approve friend requests and reply to emails now and then. WHAT IS THE DEAL.

At first I thought The Garden State effect was going to be a ranty anti-mainstream essay — and while it is indeed that, it turns into more of a self-examination near the end which made it worth reading.

There’s a sizeable portion of the population that listens to the music they listen to because it’s there and they don’t know any better—a reality that actually predicates the existence of mainstream music. Here’s what I mean: nobody thinks long and hard about music and what it means to them and then ultimately decides to listen to Toby Keith.

The main problem I have with this attitude is that it dismisses the opinions and tastes of anyone who isn’t an insular Pitchfork-reading hipster. That seems more than a little self-important to me, but I have a hard time giving middle class twenty-somethings credit for anything.

A related story: I was at an Apples in Stereo show a couple years ago and afterwards I stood behind some young girls to talk to Robert Schneider. When they were done, I moved up and went on about how much their album Tone Soul Evolution meant to me in my middle class twenty-something way. My eyes might have gotten a little misty as I tried to put my intangible feelings for that album into words.

While we talked, he told me that the girls before me were disappointed that the Apples didn’t play their song from the Powerpuff Girls Movie soundtrack. Robert said they “don’t play that shit” but said he was disappointed they didn’t play more songs off of Tone Soul Evolution for me.

I guess I should have felt like a true fan, that my interest in them was “pure” and that he and I shared some sort of special musical connection. But mostly I wished the Apples in Stereo had more teenage girl fans so they could have played a better venue with decent sound.